Karl Korsch

In this text from 1938, Karl Korsch puts forward the notion that Marxism in Russia effectively served as the ideological cloak of capitalist development, but that this was in fact anticipated by theoretical concessions, made by Marx and Engels in the 1870s/1880s, to the ideas held by the Russian populists, the Narodniki.

Korsch’s article first appeared in the councilist periodical Living Marxism in February 1938. He is generally appreciative of both Freud, whose postulates about the unconscious Korsch calls a “genuine discovery,” as well as Reich’s efforts to understand the rise of fascism on its basis. Oddly, Korsch — who by then had long since abandoned Leninism and increasingly considered Marxism a lost cause — had recourse to Lenin’s arguments against the Economists in defending Marxist methodology.

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